By personalizing your workspace, you can create a work environment that is more efficient and customized to your needs. InDesign’s Workspace feature lets you arrange panels and save the configuration so you always have your most-used features right where you want them.

Your workspace is the configuration of the open panels displayed onscreen, including their locations, size, and other customizations. Once panels have been arranged to your liking, you can save that arrangement. The next time InDesign is launched, it will restart with the workspace that was active when the application was last quit. If there are multiple saved workspaces, you can choose among them from the Workspace menu (Window>Workspace).

Some users create workspaces based on their tasks on a given day. For example, if you’re working on text styling, you might save a Text workspace displaying the Character Styles and Paragraph Styles panels.

Create a Workspace

1. Select Window>Workspace>New Workspace.
2. Enter a name for the workspace. Click the Panel Locations and Menu Customization checkboxes to save those attributes.
3. Click OK.

The new workspace will be saved and set as the one in use.

Follow those simple steps to create workspaces that help you work more efficiently!

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Posted by: Monica Murphy

Monica Murphy has worked in the publishing industry for over 30 years supporting publishing operations of various sizes. In her role as Technical Product Manager for Technology for Publishing, she shares her publishing application expertise supporting a broad range of publishing clients in InDesign best practices, cross-platform content workflows, and InDesign Template strategies. Her weekly tip and blog posts have a committed following in the InDesign community, and as a long-time participant in the InDesign pre-release community, she regularly analyzes and provides feedback for upcoming features. Monica manages the authoring and publication of Technology for Publishing’s handbooks on InDesign, InCopy, and other associated titles.